Saturday, September 01, 2012

Fewer Black Babies Killed under GOP, Dems Furious

A new study from Yale University and City University of New York shows that if the Republican Party abortion platform came to fruition and states could outlaw abortion, not only would the national abortion rate drop, but the rate among non-white Americans would drop the most.

A new working paper from Theodore Joyce, Yuxiu Zhang and Ruoding Tan . . . explores what would change about abortion access if Roe were to be overturned and the issue of legal abortion returned to the states.

Overturning Roe, however, would by no means eliminate abortion. Even in a situation where 31 states banned legal abortion, the national abortion rate would only fall 14.9 percent.

The expectation is that, in a post-Roe world, the more liberal states, like New York and California, would continue to offer legal access — just as they did prior to the Roe decision. Most of the south and large swaths of the Midwest, however, would likely ban the procedure.

Even in the most extreme situation – one where 46 states ban abortion and only four allow legal access – the abortion rate only falls by 29 percent.

But whatever you make of those topline numbers, one thing seems certain: an abortion ban would disproportionately affect women from non-white and low-income backgrounds.

. . . In the scenario involving a 31-state ban, minorities would see their abortion rates drop 1.8 percentage points more than whites. In the extreme example of a 46-state ban, the difference would be 12.3 points.

For [non-white and low-income women], an abortion ban would mean either carrying their unplanned pregnancies to term . . . or resorting to unsafe, illegal abortions . . . [which would] create new headaches for states: between the threat to public health posed by underground abortions, and the rise of teen birth rates; the added economic burden on state social and health-care services; the mockery it'd make of public statistics; and their inherent racial and socio-economic unfairness, it's hard to see how abortion bans would advance anything except ideology.